by Mary Stanton
Hunter rolled his eyes. “She’s going Southern on us, Ninja. Next thing you know, she’ll be batting her eyelashes. We’ll both feel a little safer when she reverts to tough-guy mode. Bree, you want something. What is it?”
Eddie’s tension returned like the snap of a rubber band. Hunter’s eyes rested on him for a thoughtful moment, but he said to Bree, “Out with it, woman.”
“Now, Sam. Can’t I call up two good-looking men and invite them for lunch without having an ulterior motive?”
“I doubt it sincerely.”
That made Bree laugh. “So now I know what you really think of me.”
“I doubt that, too.”
She met his eyes with a little prickle of excitement. There was electricity between them, she was sure of that. Just how strong the current was—and how much she wanted to explore it—well, she wasn’t sure of that at all. Bree took a sip of her white wine. There’d been two major relationships in her life up until now. One, with a lawyer who practiced here in the city, had been a total disaster. The other was with a man who was married to someone else. Her track record, as Antonia frequently reminded her, sucked scissors. She set her wine down and looked at Hunter. Really looked at him, not in a flirtatious way, or even with speculation, but just as a guy she was meeting for lunch. He was an inch or two over her own five-nine. He had broad shoulders, tapering to strong legs. His hands were nice, too, large, well formed, with calluses on the palms. She liked men with calluses; it meant they were doing something physical with their days. He looked older than he was, but then many cops did. That faintly cynical set to his jaw, the lines around his coin-colored eyes, were hazards of the profession.
He flushed a little under her steady regard and then cleared his throat. “Is there something on your mind, Bree? Or was this an impulse you couldn’t control?”
“We haven’t had much of a chance to catch up once the Chandler case got wrapped up.”
“You’re right,” he said in mock amazement. “It’s been what—a week, maybe more.”
“I wanted to thank you for jumping in at the last bit,” she said. “It could have gotten ugly.” She turned to Eddie. “Hunter caught a murderer for me. Just in time, too.”
“The man justifies his salary once in a while,” Eddie said.
“We’re lucky to have him here.”
Hunter looked genuinely surprised at that. “Is that a ‘my hero’ squeal? From you, of all people? You’re the last woman I’d expect to appreciate an . . .” He paused, searching for the least provocative word. “. . . intervention,” he said, finally.
“Yes. Um. Well, I did. Appreciate it a lot. So the pizza’s on me, and the pecan rolls, too.”
Bree realized she was leaning halfway across the table—practically in Hunter’s lap—as the waitress tried to set their lunch on the table. She drew back a bit and waited until both men had loaded their plates. “So, Eddie. Do you plan to stay in Savannah long? Taking a little time off?”
“Got a little business to follow up on.”
“Police-type business? Here.” She moved the red pepper flakes to within his reach. “You and Sam were on the force in New York together?”
The two men exchanged looks. Hunter said, abruptly, “Now, how did you know that?”
“Cordy Eastburn mentioned it, is all.”
“Cordy—who?”
Hunter raised one eyebrow.” “She’s the district attorney. Tough. A little too political for my taste, but she’s honest, at least. Interesting that she already knows you rolled into town.” He looked at Bree. “Care to tell me how Eddie’s name came up?”
“Cordy knows everything that happens in this town before it happens,” she said to Eddie. “I took on a new client yesterday afternoon. A Sunday, mind you, and a chance meeting at that, and first thing I know Cordy’s got me up against the wall.”
“O’Rourke,” Eddie said. His left knee jigged up and down like a jackhammer. Bree resisted the impulse to put her hand on it to make him stop. “It’s gotta be O’Rourke.”
“Tully O’Rourke,” Bree said. “That’s right.”
Hunter exhaled. “Why don’t you tell us straight out what’s on your mind?”
Was that disappointment in his eyes? It was. Bree sighed. Maybe she had lousy relationships with men because she was lame at the whole business of romance.
“I’d heard that Eddie might have some background information about a client of mine. To be precise, the deceased husband of a client of mine.”
Hunter scowled at her. “You shouldn’t be getting mixed up with the O’Rourkes, Bree.”
“I wouldn’t say mixed up, exactly,” she said. “And aren’t you making some mighty big guesses? Although maybe I’m making an assumption I shouldn’t. You are here to follow up on the O’Rourke case, aren’t you, Sergeant?”
Eddie started to reply, but Hunter got there first. “More to the point, what do you have to do with Tully O’Rourke?”
“She’s offered me a retainer to handle some leases and contracts. All civil stuff.”
“You actually got a check?” Eddie said.
“Well, not yet. But I plan on setting up a preliminary client interview a little later this week.”
“Get a check up front,” Eddie advised. “And then wait until the sucker clears before you do diddly.”
“Now you see,” Bree said, “this is exactly why it’s so useful to have friends in the know. She’s not the sort of person to pay her bills, Sergeant?”
Eddie set his half-eaten slice of pizza down. “She’s a freakin’ murderer,” he said bluntly. “She shot that poor slob of a husband in the head, set it up to look like a suicide, and skipped town with a couple million in insurance money.”
Bree wasn’t sure which was the more interesting comment to follow up on first—the fact that Eddie Chin was convinced Tully O’Rourke had murdered her husband, or Eddie’s description of the victim as a poor slob. “Four and a half billion dollars disappeared from O’Rourke Investment in the space of three days,” she said. “A lot of it was because the stocks were so overvalued it wasn’t funny—but a fair amount of it was due to out-and-out fraud. That’s why the CFO, Cullen Jameson, went to jail. If O’Rourke weren’t dead, odds are he’d be serving ten to fifteen months at Schuyler along with his buddy Jameson. As it is, two of his top men are out on bail, and it’s a sure thing that Cullen Jameson, at least, is guilty. I’m not sure about the other guy.”
“Barney Gottschmidt,” Eddie said. “He was of counsel.”
The name rang a bell. Bree remembered the quiet gray man at the auction. “A lawyer? Medium height, balding, midforties?”
“That’s the one.”
“He was here yesterday, at this auction where I met Mrs. O’Rourke. He seemed very interested in helping Mrs. O’Rourke get her belongings back.”
“Gottschmidt’s out of it,” Eddie said dismissively. “Still has his license to practice law and he seems to be clean for the fraud charges.”
“But O’Rourke’s a poor slob, and not a crook, you said? That’s a switch. It’s a bad thing that O’Rourke was driven to suicide, but nobody I know felt sorry for him.”
Eddie hunched his shoulders and swallowed pizza. “Whatever,” he muttered.
“No, I’m interested. Mostly because I’d like to know about Tully before going in, but your perception of the husband is important, I think.”
“You know much about him? O’Rourke?”
“A little,” Bree said. “He was from somewhere in the Midwest, wasn’t he? Had a full scholarship to Harvard and then a pretty impressive record at the Wharton School of Business. A self-made man.”
“You know about Asperger’s syndrome?” Eddie demanded.
Bree blinked at him. “I’m sorry, did you say Asperger’s?”
“It’s, like, related to autism.”
Bree looked at Hunter. He grinned suddenly. “Just relax,” he said, in an undertone. “Once Ninja’s at the wheel, there’s no getting out of the
tank unless you jump.”
“Okay—it’s related to autism.”
“People like that—they’re brilliant in some things, see. But they have no empathy. Like O’Rourke was this financial genius, but he was clueless about human beings. You get some poor fifteen-year-old runaway from Idaho fresh off the bus in Grand Central Station—she’ll know more about depravity than Russell O’Rourke. The guy was a walking sucker when it came to his ‘loved ones.’ ” Eddie put the maximum amount of contempt in the phrase. “Well, his loved one screwed him over royally when he was alive, and then murdered his ass to boot. And I’m going to see that she doesn’t get away with it.” He set his hands flat on the table and stared at Bree. It was a very unsettling look, she thought. The man seemed obsessed with the chase. “There wasn’t much in the media about the suicide itself, was there?” Bree hazarded. “I mean, I didn’t pay much more attention to his death than the average reader, but I would have remembered any speculation about murder. Anyone would. Wasn’t she out at some big charity dinner? And didn’t she come home to find him at his desk? She walks in the door with a few of her friends and he chooses that moment to pull the trigger.” She shuddered. “Ugh.”
“Yeah. Well. That’s what it looked like. But that’s not what happened. The widow is smart. Very smart. But not smart enough.”
Bree glanced at Hunter. The lieutenant had absolutely no expression on his face. “So,” she said, after a lengthy silence, “what tipped you off that this was murder and not suicide?”
Eddie’s leg started going up and down again, like a manic elevator. “I’ve got three things that should have been enough for the grand jury—but we’ve got this punk prosecutor up north that doesn’t take a step out of his office without rock-solid guarantees.”
Prosecutorial diffidence, Bree knew, was a very real phenomenon, especially in cases with as high a profile as O’Rourke’s. “Three things,” she repeated. She kept her voice calm and soothing. Eddie looked like he might fly out of the booth at any minute.
“Yes.” He gave Hunter a defiant glare. “You take them one at a time, they don’t add up to much, I admit. But you put them altogether and you got Murder One. Murder with intent. Premeditated.” Chin slammed his fist onto the table. The glasses rattled. Behind the bar up front, Maureen, the manager, glanced sharply at them. Bree ate at Huey’s a lot—and on one memorable occasion, she’d been in the middle of a fracas that upended most of the tables, smashed almost all of the glassware, and left Maureen with permanent skepticism about Bree’s potential for disruptive behavior. The only good consequence of that particular skirmish was that Bree always got superb service. They couldn’t keep her out of the restaurant, but they could encourage a speedy departure.
Bree smiled and waved reassuringly in Maureen’s direction. Then she turned back to Eddie. “There are three things that make this murder and not suicide, you said,” she said. “I’d surely like to know what they are, if I might.”
Eddie swept the remains of the pizza aside and cleared a space on the tabletop. “It’s about seven o’clock the evening of the twelfth of August. O’Rourke’s at his desk. He writes a suicide note. ‘I very much regret the collapse of the O’Rourke Investment Bank, a regret that I will carry to my grave. My apologies to you all. Good-bye.’ He writes that in ink, see? With this Italian pen only he uses, that he got from his wife for his sixty-fifth birthday. Then he rigs his twelve-gauge onto the desk chair, attaches a wire to the trigger, sits on his desk, and waits until his wife walks in with a couple of friend of hers. Then, blam!” Eddie pointed his forefinger at Bree and jerked it up with a second blam! louder than the first. “Miss Tully’s with this Dutchman . . .”
“Rutger VanHoughton?” Bree asked.
“That’s the guy. You know him?”
Bree remembered the cool blue gaze from the day before. “I’ve met him.”
“And another friend of hers is there, too. Barrie. So. O’Rourke’s brains are scattered six ways from Sunday, VanHoughton calls 911, and by the time we catch the call, she’s boo-hooing away in the corner.”
Bree exchanged a look with Hunter. “Seems pretty straightforward to me.”
Eddie leaned forward, his eyes intense. “She did it. I don’t know how. But I’m gonna find out.”
Bree frowned. “Do you have photos of the crime scene?”
“I’ve got a freakin’ movie of the crime scene. The vic’s slumped sideways onto the floor, scuff marks on the front of the desk where his heels whacked into it—yeah, it looks good to go.”
“But . . .” Bree said.
“But we got three things that don’t add up. First, the top half of the suicide note’s been torn off . . . and where’s the other half? Second, the security system to the penthouse has been turned off and we don’t have a video of the scene—we just got these people swearing that’s what happened. And third, we find a fragment of a bullet from a .22 a couple of feet from the corpse.”
Eddie leaned back. “Like I say, those things independent of one another, it doesn’t sound like much. Adding them up—that’s another story.”
“Did you question Mrs. O’Rourke about any of these discrepancies?”
“Sure I did. And she’s got an answer for each one of them. O’Rourke was the tenth richest man in the world at one point in his career—but he saves scrap paper. Tears the top third of a page that only has, say, a paragraph on it. Saves the paper for notes and such. Two, flipping penthouse is so secure, they don’t need an alarm. So half the time, the system’s off. And finally, she has no idea—no idea—where the bullet fragment came from.”
“But it was a shot from the twelve-gauge that killed him. I don’t understand what the .22 has to do with it.”
“You will,” Eddie said confidently.
“Do you?” Bree asked.
“Not yet. But I’m working on it.” He ran his hands over the top of his head. “Yeah. I’m working on it.”
Bree kept her skepticism to herself. Hunter, on the other hand, shook his head a little. “I don’t know, Ninja. I know you have this gut feeling. I respect it. But there’s a big difference between what you know and what you can prove. I know you’re sure about this. But even so.” He didn’t say anything more and an uncomfortable silence fell over the table.
Bree kept her cell phone in her jacket pocket, and it vibrated against her hip. She excused herself and walked away from the table to take the call. It was a text message from Ron:
PROF MEE T 2 pm SOONEST
She checked the time. Professor Cianquino lived several miles away, on the ground floor of an old plantation that had been converted to apartments. If she cut her lunch short, she’d have twenty minutes to get there. Meetings with her retired professor were command performances, more or less. She texted Ron, OK, and went back to the table to make her farewells.
“I’ve got to get a move on myself,” Eddie said. “Thank you for the pizza.”
“I promised you pecan rolls,” Bree said, “and Hunter knows I’m not one to forget my word. Are you in town for a while?”
“For as long as it takes.”
Bree nodded. “Yes. Well. Maybe in the next couple of days we can sit down and talk again, Eddie.” She glanced at Hunter, who could be a stickler about these things. “Maybe even take a look at the file?”
“Sure thing. Be glad of another take on the case.”
“You’re still insisting on taking Tully O’Rourke on as a client?” Hunter broke in.
“I’m not insisting on anything,” Bree said pleasantly. “But I feel obliged to, at this point.”
“Obliged?” Eddie asked. “I don’t get it.”
Bree thought of that pitiable cry for help: I want to go home.
“My guess is, Mrs. O’Rourke thinks that Bree has something unique to offer,” Hunter said. “And perhaps she’s right.”
“Perhaps she is.” Bree checked the amount on the bill (she always received the bill with her food, at Huey’s) and left the cash on the table
. She drove out to Melrose in a thoughtful mood, turning Hunter’s parting comment over in her mind.
Bree has something unique to offer.
She’d have to ask him what he meant by that.
Seven
Tell me before you get onto your high horse
Just what you expect me to do.
—Tim Rice, “Waltz for Eva and Che,” Evita
Melrose sat, gracious and aloof, brooding over the river. This late in the year, the gardens surrounding the big old house were subdued to a silvery green. Thick hydrangea blossoms had faded to the color of coffee clotted with thick cream. The rosebushes were trimmed back and tied up with twine. The camellias were soft patches of cloud among the bushes, the scent of the flowers drifting through the air like perfume at a premiere. The lawn was green under drifting piles of Spanish moss. The remnants of silvery branches broken off the live oaks littered the paths like elegant bones.
Melrose was three stories high, each story fronted by a broad verandah supported by Doric pillars. Double French doors led from the verandahs to the house itself. Sometimes Bree thought that what she loved most about Savannah was the immense variety of architecture at the heart of the Historic District. French Provencal sat next to Georgian, which in turn shouldered against Queen Anne, Federal, and Southern Gothic. But each time she visited Melrose, which reminded her of Plessey, her own family home back in the Carolinas, she knew it was the distinctive style of the Old South, with broad porches and sturdy pillars, that lay nearest her heart. Professor Cianquino must have thought so, too. He’d retired from Bree’s former law school the year she’d gotten her JD and bought the ground-floor apartment nearest the river and had lived here quietly ever since.
Bree paused on her way up the brick path to the double front doors. The card with Leah’s name embossed upon it was still in her purse. Perhaps, these days, his retirement wasn’t as quiet as he’d hoped it would be.
The familiar scent of lemon wax, hothouse flowers, and the musty, welcoming odor of old house greeted her when she went through the front door into the foyer. The flowers in the big jade vases on the Sheraton lowboy against the wall were fresh.
